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We're getting a pretty solid bunch of tags for linguistics concepts, but most SE sites also have tags for kinds of questions which are useful too, especially when we identify the trends.

One trend is "Do languages exist with such and such?" and I think it might be useful to gather them under a tag but I'm not sure what to name it.

possibly, but maybe "feature" has a technical sense which might make it ambiguous or confusing sometimes. Are there some other possibilities?

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  • I corrected the fake-tags in your question and in the answers. :)
    – Alenanno
    Oct 5, 2011 at 20:22

4 Answers 4

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What about ?

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We already have , so how about ? Maybe it isn't the most intuitive name, except by analogy with reference-request, but it describes exactly what these questions are seeking.

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  • I dunno. You can fulfil a request but you can't fulfil a language (-: Oct 6, 2011 at 7:27
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How about ? Such questions usually ask for a list of languages that satisfy some criteria.

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  • I think that would make it look like we were encouraging lists of all kinds. Answers to a tag of this sort wouldn't have to be lists anyway. They might include only one example and still be a good answer. Oct 6, 2011 at 7:26
  • Alright. I +1'd "language-by-feature". I seem to be too "semantic" in my thinking... and so, for me, a list (set) could have one or even zero items ;-).
    – prash Mod
    Oct 6, 2011 at 12:58
  • There's always tag synonyms for fixing and adjusting the details later too (-: Oct 6, 2011 at 17:34
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I, too, was under the impression that we had a lot of these questions, but now that I look through the questions it seems that even if they are there, a lot of them are asking more about how a specific feature works and are tagged for that feature or an area of study. To me that's more important than grouping by question format (for example, questions about phonology are more closely related than questions that happen to ask "are there other languages with x").

If we do go with grouping these, seems like a good place to start looking for questions that might fit. Regarding possible names:

Resources like WALS do use the word features but more generally call these properties, specifically "structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties". In EL&U we use the term request for some of the questions asking to help find a word or find whether a term for something exists. Obviously this isn't a feature-request because that sounds like a request for an addition to software, but maybe it's a request to find a language that has a certain property—a language-property-request, cross-linguistic-request, something like that.

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  • I have been unsure when to use the cross-linguistic. Should it be for questions which specifically cover more than one language, questions which might implicitly cover more than one language, or something technical that I'm unaware of. Would you like to give it a tag wiki? Sep 22, 2011 at 20:09
  • The closest tag I've been using to a "request" tag would be terminology when I'm asking what term is used to cover a specific phenomenon, but of course it can also be used to ask for clarification of terms you already know and other things. Sep 22, 2011 at 20:10

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